Along with advancement of computer communication technologies, people carry out remote message transmission increasingly by various communication tools in addition to their face-to-face communication. Instant Messengers (IM) such as MSN, ICQ, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, etc., are widely used online charting software at present. Communication tools such as NOTES, Outlook Express, etc., can also transmit a message in a manner of Email, etc. For transmission of a text message, a platform carrying these communication tools, e.g., a computer, stores numbers and characters by assigning one of the numbers to each of the characters. Prior to the birth of Unicode, there were hundreds of different encoding schemes for assigning the numbers to the characters, but no single encoding scheme can contain a sufficient number of characters. As well known, two prerequisites are present for an ability of the computer to reproduce the characters properly: 1) the computer shall be aware of how the characters are encoded, that is, it must be able to detect the encoding scheme and to decode the characters; and 2) the computer has a corresponding set of characters installed therein. Consequently, a risk of failing to reproducing a text message properly may arise in the event that the text message is transmitted between different encoding schemes and platforms supporting their respective distinct sets of characters.
Unicode can relieve this problem to some extent by assigning a unique number to each character. Unfortunately, if not all the platforms in communication support Unicode and install all sets of characters, or not all the messages transmitted between the communication platforms are encoded by the Unicode, a real-time communication receiver may still be unable to reproduce a received message properly due to the fact that not all the two prerequisites are met. A scenario may be imaged as follows.
A Chinese student A abroad in France is going to chat with his family B living in China, but no set of Chinese characters has been installed on his computer and can be installed at the public library. His family B has got no sufficient knowledge of English to express his or her idea clearly and has to type in Chinese words. However, a message transmitted from the computer of B is displayed on the computer of A as garbled characters. In this scenario, a message in French transmitted from A will also be displayed on the computer of B as garbled characters if no set of French characters is installed on the computer of B despite the ability of B to read French. How do A and B carry out smooth communication through an IM?
It is apparent that, the same problem of failing to reproduce a transmitted text message properly at a receiver may also arise if any party involved in transmission of a text message can not support a character set encoding scheme corresponding to the transmitted text message during the transmission of the text message, for example, in an Email, through use of a communication tool such as NOTES, Outlook Express, etc.